About CR09

Building on from the success of CR07, Cardiff Racing embarked on their 2012 entry; CR08. Many changes were made to the design to improve the performance, ease of maintenance and packaging of the car.

CR08 is powered by an Aprillia SXV 550 V-Twin engine with optimised intake and exhaust systems. This year saw a selective laser sintered plenum, designed in house with Ricardo Wave analysis, fitted to the car to bring about a 7% increase in bhp. Attached we find the student designed spool that has resulted in faster lap times when compared to a differential and a shorter optimised exhaust system that brings about a 17% weight reduction on the system.

Housing the Aprillia is the new shorter and lighter, half aluminium honeycomb, half steel space frame chassis that improves packing efficiency, access to components and drivability. The seatback angle has been redesigned to 40°, thus reducing the need for packaging and lowering the drivers centre of gravity. This in turn allows lowering the steering wheel, front roll hoop and improves the handling of the car. After the endurance event at Silverstone our driver stated that it was the best handling car to come from Cardiff racing so far.

Other developments brought to this car include a new compact backlit LCD dashboard, which connects to the MoTec; enabling all data to be directly recorded and analysed. The DL1 is used together with the dash to display real time lap times, data from a 3 axis accelerometer and a drift sensor. This is housed in a student designed SLS steering wheel which mounts the paddle shifters for the new Flat shifter which saves around 150-165ms per shift.

Finally, to combat the problems that were encountered on CR07, new wheel centres and hubs have been manufactured by Keizer to custom specifications. The hubs alone give a 39.5% and 11.5% weight reduction in the front and rear hubs respectively.